India after Naxalbari: Unfinished History

368 Pages·2018·3.76 MB·English

by  Bernard D’Mello

INDIA AFTER NAXALBARI
INDIA AFTER NAXALBARI
Unfinished History
Bernard D’Mello
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS
New York
Copyright © 2018 by Bernard D’Mello
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
available from the publisher
ISBN: 978-158367-706-3 (paper)
ISBN: 978-158367-707-0 (cloth)
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS, NEW YORK
monthlyreview.org
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Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Naxalite! “Spring Thunder,” Phase I
2. “1968” India as History
3. Unequal Development and Evolution of the Ruling Bloc
4. Naxalite! “Spring Thunder,” Phase II
5. India’s “1989”—“Financial Aristocracy” and Government à Bon Marché
6. “The Near and the Far”—India’s Rotten Liberal-Political Democracy
7. Maoist! “Spring Thunder,” Phase III
8. “Rotten at the Heart”—The “Secular State”
9. “Little Man, What Now?”—In the Wake of Semi-Fascist and Sub-Imperialist
Tendencies
10. History, Memory, and Dreams—Reimagining “New Democracy”
Appendix: Caste
Notes
Index
Dedicated to the memory of
ANURADHA GHANDY (1954–2008)
She led the struggle for bread and roses, the fight for a richer and fuller life for
all NIRMAL KUMAR CHANDRA (1936–2014)
One of India’s finest radical economists, whose aspirations lay beyond the limits
of “acceptable scholarship”
P. A. SEBASTIAN (1938–2015)
Indefatigable lawyer–crusader for democratic rights, pioneer of Russell
Tribunals in India
Acknowledgments
As I write these words of gratitude, I am filled with sadness upon hearing about
the passing away of comrade Vikas (Arvind was his other alias), a politburo
member of the Communist Party of India (Maoist). In the mid-1980s, as a
journalist associated with the Kolkata-based radical-left weekly, Frontier, on a
visit to the countryside of the district of Gaya in the State of Bihar, I first met
Vikas, who was then a prominent leader of the Mazdoor Kisan Sangram Samiti
(worker–peasant militant struggle association), and the Communist Party of
India (Marxist–Leninist) (Party Unity), one of the predecessors of the CPI
(Maoist). Vikas related to the poor and landless peasants in an utterly egalitarian
and democratic manner; he seemed to have earned their affection, loyalty, and
respect by his deeds.
On this trip, when I was leaving a village on my way to the next one, an
elderly man under the care of his grandson insisted on accompanying us (me, a
Frontier companion, and our local guide) right to the outskirts of his village.
When the time came to say our goodbyes and Lal Salaams (Red Salutes), I told
him that he should not have taken all this effort to come so far with us. To which
he replied: “You have come all the way from Kolkata to learn about us, our
lives, our struggles, and our concerns. You care about us.”
I never forgot Vikas or what this peasant-comrade told me, and was inspired,
much later, when I felt adequately intellectually equipped, to write the essay
“What Is Maoism?.” And now, I’ve penned this book. Hundreds of millions of
people have been the victims of Indian capitalism’s irrationality, brutality, and
inhumanity, and it is the actions of those who could not remain unmoved and
were compelled to revolt that have motivated me to write this book. But as I
write these words of a sense of obligation, I record with sorrow the death of
Ashok Mitra, my favorite columnist, whose weekly columns, taken together,
constitute what I have called a Guernica of political prose, so full of life, of
anger and indignation, as well as empathy and compassion. He had given me
some sound advice on finishing what I had begun, this book, and looked forward
to the end product, but now he’s no more.
The New York-based independent socialist magazine, Monthly Review has,
over the years, been an essential part of my education, and it’s wonderful that
Monthly Review Press is publishing this book. The Marxist intellectual
“underworld” in India has proved to be one of the best circles for my political
education—Samar Sen, Timir Basu, P. A. Sebastian, Sumanta Banerjee, C. V.
Subba Rao, K. Balagopal, Tilak Dasgupta, Ajit Roy, Sudesh Vaid, Gautam
Navlakha, and Rajani X. Desai come to mind at first thought. Besides the ones I
mention, there have also been left-party activists, feminists, ecologists, Dalits,
oppressed nationalists, democratic rights’ campaigners, and pacifists, from
whose insights, probing questions, and criticism I have learned a great deal. I
was very fond of my thesis supervisor, the radical economist Nirmal Kumar
Chandra, who later became a good friend and encouraged me on the
unconventional path I took, which has eventually led to this book. And, I cannot
forget my first editor, Samar Sen (Shômor babu), founder-editor of Frontier,
celebrated post-Tagorean Bengali poet, who encouraged me to widen my
intellectual repertoire.
Initial versions of what became chapters 6 and 9 first appeared in the
Economic & Political Weekly (EPW), whose then editor C. Rammanohar
Reddy’s comments and suggestions helped improve both form and content. The
preliminary text of chapter 9 was in the form of notes that I had prepared for a
Sheikh Abdul Rawoof memorial lecture I delivered at Thrissur (in Kerala) in
March 2014. I presented an embryonic version of chapter 8 at a seminar
organized by the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights in Nagpur,
and in a lecture organized by students of the Radical Study Circle, Tata Institute
of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, both in 2015. Parts of chapter 10 were
presented as part of the first Randhir Singh memorial lecture I was invited to
deliver at New Delhi in January 2017.
Chapters 1, 4, and 7 first took shape in a series of lectures I gave on the
Maoist movement in India for a postgraduate course on “State, Democracy, and
Conflicts in India,” taught by Professor Farrukh Faheem at the TISS. I also
benefitted from a conference on “Marxist Revolutionary Movements across the
World” at the University of Oxford in July 2011, organized by professors Alpa
Shah and Stephen Feuchtwang, where I presented a paper on the Maoist
movement in India. The Monthly Review Foundation’s former online magazine,
MRZine, with Yoshie Furuhashi as editor, and the Bengali “small magazine,”
Aneek, with the late Dipankar Chakrabarty as editor, were open to my ideas and
analyses presented in occasional journalistic pieces, which, taken together, made
the penning of chapter 7 a lot easier than it would otherwise have been.
I thank Subhas Aikat of the Kharagpur-based Cornerstone Publications;
Rajani Desai and Girish Srinivasan of the Mumbai-based Research Unit for
Political Economy; Alpa Shah, Swapna Banerjee-Guha, Ajmal Khan, and Arup
Sen for readily responding to my requests to locate and send me certain essential
books and papers. The construction of the maps I owe to my EPW colleague,
Abhishek Shaw, and I am grateful to him for devoting precious hours to the task.
For the photograph of Maoist guerrillas on the march that graces the book’s
cover, Monthly Review Press and I are obligated to the well-known
documentary filmmaker Sanjay Kak.
The writing of this book put an unintended additional load on my EPW
colleagues, for I was on leave from my job for a year and a half. I express my
sense of obligation to them.
I am grateful to John Mage for reading a first draft of the entire manuscript.
His classical approach to Marxist analyses, his queries, his pointing me to errors,
his encouragement. John, I needed the kind of gentle assurance and guidance
you provided with regard to my ways of looking at and thinking about the
subject matter of this book. Uma and Anand Chakravarti’s helpful comments on
a draft of the Appendix on Caste were valuable. Swapna Banerjee-Guha’s
reactions to a draft of chapter 1 gave me the confidence I needed to plod on, for
she had been what social anthropologists call a “participant observer” in Kolkata
in the course of “Spring Thunder,” Phase I. Stephen Rego, who copyedited the
entire manuscript, actually did much more than that—his observations on
chapters 1, 4, and 7 have enriched both form and content. Michael D. Yates,
Director, Monthly Review Press, read the entire manuscript after it had been
copyedited, and helpfully pointed to transatlantic differences with regard to
commas and much else that both Stephen and I had overlooked. Michael’s
words, “I enjoyed reading your book and learned a great deal from it,” mean a
lot to me. Thank you, Michael.
I must record a big thank-you to Martin Paddio and Susie Day at Monthly
Review Press; and to K. K. Saxena, publisher, Aakar Books, Delhi; for all it
takes to reach out to readers and keep the enterprise going.
Finally, words would never suffice to express my gratitude to ma and pa,
Jean Florence Abrahams and Charles Francis D’Mello, working-class parents
who raised me; to Pauline Menezes, my partner, who has stood by me through
my darkest nights, kept me from the brink of the abyss. And, to our son Samar
and daughter Vera, I am now in debt to the tune of five holidays in the hills and
by the riverside.
—BERNARD D’MELLO